CS2 Mirage Callouts: The 6 That Matter

Mirage has twenty three named callouts that top teams actually stand in. Six of them carry two thirds of the map.

We read 1,529 Mirage rounds from 72 tournament matches involving 277 HLTV top 50 players, and recorded where every player was at three moments in the round, 16,463 positions in total, each one tagged with the callout it falls in.

This is not a list of every word on the map. It is the shortlist, measured, so you learn the names your team will actually say in the order they will say them.

The six that carry Mirage

Across both sides, six callouts account for 67.0 percent of every recorded position. The other seventeen share the remaining 33.0 percent between them.

They are A Site, B Site, CT Spawn, Back Alley, Top of Mid and Window. Three of those are CT words, two are T words, and Top of Mid belongs to whoever takes it.

A Site and B Site alone are 37.6 percent. Mirage is a map where the sites themselves are the busiest ground, which is not true everywhere.

Note what is missing from the six. Catwalk is 3.2 percent and Truck is 2.6 percent. Both get talked about constantly in guides. Neither is where the map spends its time.

If you want ten instead of six, add Palace Interior, Palace Alley, Side Alley and Underpass. That takes you to 87.2 percent. The remaining thirteen callouts share 12.8 percent between them.

Where CTs stand, and where they actually meet the enemy

This is the most useful chart on the page, because the two bars disagree.

The grey bars are where CTs are holding once the setup has settled. The orange bars are where the first contact of the round actually happens.

B Site is 13.0 percent of CT setups and 35.3 percent of first contacts. That is the biggest gap on the map, 22.3 points. One in eight CTs is standing on B, and more than one in three opening fights happens there. The B anchor on Mirage is outnumbered by definition and the data says he meets the round first.

Window is the second gap, 2.7 percent of setups and 13.9 percent of first contacts. Almost nobody holds Window, and 868 opening fights happened in it. It is a spot you arrive at, not a spot you sit in.

A Site is the only big callout where both bars are close, 27.2 percent of setups and 32.0 percent of first contacts. It is the most predictable place on the CT side.

Now the reverse. Catwalk is 9.8 percent of CT setups and 0.4 percent of first contacts. Truck is 7.9 percent and 0.4 percent. Together those two hold 17.7 percent of all CT positions and produce 0.9 percent of the opening duels. They are rotation ground, not fighting ground.

Apartments and Palace Interior go further, 5.6 percent of CT setups each and effectively zero first contacts. If you are holding one of those on CT and the round opens somewhere else, that is normal, not a mistake.

The T side is three lanes and a stairwell

In the first 18 seconds of the round, before the T side has committed to anything, three callouts carry 60.8 percent of everything they do, and five carry 91.4 percent.

Back Alley at 22.5 percent and Top of Mid at 21.3 percent are a dead heat. Those are the two default openings on Mirage, and across 1,529 rounds the T side split between them almost exactly evenly.

Palace Alley, Side Alley and Palace Interior together are 47.6 percent. The palace side of the map is where nearly half of all early T movement lives, spread across three names rather than one, which is why palace comms sound busier than mid comms even when the same number of players are involved.

Everything else early is a rounding error. Underpass is 5.5 percent, T Spawn 1.2 percent, Apartments under 0.5 percent. The T side of Mirage is three lanes and a stairwell, and almost nothing else happens before the round has a shape.

What the numbers do not tell you

Worth being clear about the limits, because this is measured data and measured data has edges.

These are counts of where players were, not an argument about where you should be. A low number does not mean a position is bad. Jungle at 0.6 percent is a real CT position that wins real rounds, it is just taken rarely.

The CT numbers describe setups at the top level, where teams have practised them together. Your solo queue teammates have not. And this is tournament Mirage over a fixed window, so a meta shift would move these figures.

What the numbers do tell you reliably is which words you will hear, how often, and in what order. That is what a callout guide is for.

How to actually learn them

Three steps, in order.

1. Learn the six first. A Site, B Site, CT Spawn, Back Alley, Top of Mid, Window. Say them out loud while you walk the map offline. Six words is one evening.

2. Add the next four when the six feel automatic. Palace Interior, Palace Alley, Side Alley and Underpass take you from 67.0 percent to 87.2 percent of everything that happens.

3. Stop there until something forces you further. The remaining thirteen share 12.8 percent between them. You will pick those up from your team rather than from a list.

If you want to see the actual positions rather than the words, the CS2 Pro Positions tool puts every one of these rounds on the official radar. Pick Mirage, pick a player, and watch where he stands and when he moves. That is the same data this article is built on, except you can see it.

Where to go next

Callouts are vocabulary. What you do with them is a different problem, and the data on this page points at three specific things.

First, if 35.3 percent of first contacts happen on B Site and another 13.9 percent in Window, that is where crosshair placement earns the most. There is an exact correct height and it comes out of the game's own player dimensions, not anyone's preference. It is in crosshair placement.

Second, which seat you take decides which callouts you live in. What 15,122 pro opening duels show about roles has the opening duel win rate for each one.

Third, Mirage is one half of the pair most players should learn first. The other is Dust 2, and the Dust 2 callouts built the same way show a map where six names cover 78 percent, even tighter than this one. The maps guide explains why learning seven maps is a mistake.

And before any of it, make sure you can see your crosshair against the sand and glass Mirage is made of. Build one in the CS2 Crosshair Generator, and check your sensitivity against your mousepad with the eDPI Calculator.